Well what do you know, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is already playing in theatres and raking in the big bucks… in South Korea.

Various sources are reporting that the film opened there on Thursday (which might mean yesterday, given that it’s on the other side of the international date line), and that its first-day gross was on par with that of films like Gravity and Inception. I imagine those particular examples are cited because they were big hits that, like Noah, did not have the advantage of being sequels or part of a franchise.

Amusingly, The Hollywood Reporter suggests that the film owes part of its success to the fact that South Korea “has a large Christian population”, while Variety notes that “a large percentage of the South Korean population is agnostic”. Well, there’s no reason the film couldn’t be playing to both audiences.

Three men who have actually seen Darren Aronofsky’s Noah took part in a panel discussion of the film at the National Religious Broadcasters convention nine days ago. And now all three men have basically issued ten-point statements responding to the film.

The first to do so was John Snowden, a biblical advisor to the film whose treatise ‘Why People of Faith Can Embrace Noah’ was actually distributed at the event itself before it was posted online a few days later.

The second was Jerry Johnson, who gave Christianity Today a list of five positive things about the movie last week and now, as of yesterday, has provided them with a spoiler-filled list of five negative things about the movie. More on that in a minute.

And the third is Phil Cooke, whose article ‘Should Christians Support the Movie Noah?’ is now up at the Huffington Post. (The HuffPost version of the article is divided into nine points, but the version at Charisma News — which is where I first saw the article — is divided into ten, so it fits the basic pattern here.)

Anyone who still thinks Hollywood doesn’t care about the family hasn’t been going to the movies lately. The big-budget blockbusters this summer are about little else, and even religion’s been getting a reprieve.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park demonstrates that dinosaurs can be the most loving parents of all. Speed 2: Cruise Control trades in the original film’s punchline — in which two strangers spoke of basing their relationship on sex — for a marriage proposal and talk of raising children.